


A New Beginning

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV)
Genre: After The Empty House, First Time, M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 07:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is only now, in the dull light of a storm lashed day, that I knowledge the implications of what passed between us in the early hours of the morning. The implications of the past four nights when I have slept beside him. I glance at the rain weeping down the window. It has been unseasonally cold of late and the nights have been bitter, but I am not in the habit of climbing into bed with my patients, no matter how chilled they may be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> Another old story that I decided to post today.

I can still feel the ghost of his head upon my shoulder. He feared to wake me with his presumption, but I did not sleep. It seemed to be such a simple thing, such a natural thing, to put my arm around him as we lay next to one another in bed. To whisper ‘stay close’ when he went to pull away and to press my lips to his forehead as he drifted into slumber.

It is only now, in the dull light of a storm lashed day, that I knowledge the implications of what passed between us in the early hours of the morning. The implications of the past four nights when I have slept beside him. I glance at the rain weeping down the window. It has been unseasonally cold of late and the nights have been bitter, but I am not in the habit of climbing into bed with my patients, no matter how chilled they may be.

Perhaps my heart beat a little faster that first night when I boldly offered to keep him warm and I was not refused.  And there was that moment of awkwardness on the second and third nights when I asked if he desired my company. Last evening he was exhausted and despite the laudanum I had given him his head was still pounding. So I suggested that he might rather sleep undistributed, but he shook his head on the pillow.

“I need you, Watson,” he whispered.

It was with a sense of relief that I climbed in beside him. I truly had not wished to sleep alone. In the space of a few nights I had become accustomed to his presence beside me. We settled as we had done on previous nights a respectable distance apart. It was only after I heard the church clock strike one that his head came to rest, so very tentatively, upon my shoulder.

Ethics. Morality. They drummed at me like the ceaseless rain on the glass. He was my patient as well as my dearest friend. Not that he didn’t know his own mind. He might still be recovering from a bout of pleurisy that had almost cost him his life, but Holmes was perfectly capable of telling me to go to damnation if he didn’t want me.

He had not done so.

And I did not doubt that he knew as well as I where this nocturnal path was taking us, perhaps the only wonder was that it had not taken us there long ago. I ought to have been dismayed. I ought to have been shocked and yet I searched in vain for repulsion and guilt.  He was Holmes, my dearest Holmes and if I could reconcile my medical role with that of friend and lover... Lover, the word echoed in my mind, admitted to for the first time, terrifying and exhilarating in its implications.

Law, church and state could destroy us both, yet we had always taken risks, foolish, dangerous, exciting risks and this would be another.  I squared my shoulders and found that I did not fear the retribution of either God or man.  If the worse ever befell us then I should bear up and face it with fortitude, but we would not court disaster. Why should suspicion fall upon us when we had shared rooms for years and been the closest of companions with never a hint of impropriety?  I had seen enough of the world to know that sin is not written upon the countenance and we could be discreet.    

I had only one more consultation at four that afternoon and the hands of the clock on the mantel dragged slowly against my impatience.  My patient arrived early and I believe that I was attentive to her womanly aliments, but duty was a hard taskmaster that day. The moment the green baize door closed behind her I doused the fire and turned out the gas the dark afternoon had necessitated. 

It was easy for procure a hansom cab, for most people had decided against venturing out into the rain swept streets where saffron curls of fog were starting to rear up from the pavement. Home had never looked more inviting and I bounded up the steps, spinning my key around in the lock without waiting for the maid to come to the door.

An irrational fear gripped me, the fear that he would have vanished whilst I toiled at my practice. That these past weeks had all been a dream and that the only reality was the wild rush of the water at Reichenbach.

Holmes dozed by the fire. He was pale as chalk and he jumped when I slammed the sitting room door. “Watson, I didn’t expect you – “

“If you ever leave me again, I shall kill you,” I said calmly.

“That would be unnecessary, if…if I were to be parted from you again death would be a kindness.” He stared down at the lopsided book on his lap. “I could not endure another three years like the last.”

“You could not endure? It was I who mourned for you, I who thought you dead and lost to me forever. It was you who travelled the world over whilst I grieved and never sent me a single word of comfort. Did you really think that I would betray you?”

“No, of course not.” Holmes looked shocked and dismayed. “I never meant to cause you such pain, but Moriarty’s agents – “

“Stop this!” I shouted.

There was a rage in me that I had not known existed. Like the raging torrent of the falls it swept away all my tenderness and all of the romantic intentions I had nurtured on my journey home. It was not meant to be like this and my heart ached for all the love that withered before my anger. I had known the truth all along and I had denied it even to myself, but this was a day of revelations.

“Tell me the truth,” I said. “All of it, omit nothing or we are finished forever, you and I.”

“You know it,” Holmes said after a long moment of silence.

“I want to hear it from your lips.” I sat down opposite him and simply waited.

At least he had courage enough to meet my gaze head on. “It was a fake,” he said, “a deceit, a lie.”

“Was there ever a Professor Moriarty?”

“Yes and he was a criminal of the darkest hue, but he was not the Machiavellian mastermind I led you to believe that he was.” Holmes laughed. “Moriarty was not the Machiavellian mastermind that he thought himself to be and he was dead before we left London.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Yes, I did.”

It was the answer I had expected, but I was still suspicious. “His murder was not reported in the newspapers.”

“Mycroft ensured that there would be no press coverage, just as he arranged for the figure in black you saw from the platform at Canterbury and again upon that alpine hillside.” Holmes started to cough. It racked his thin frame, but I did not go to him. “You must understand,” he said when he was able to continue, “that it was not the rope that I feared nor the revenge of his associates, little fish all of them.  I was weary of the life that I had, weary of Sherlock Holmes –“

“And of John Watson?” I interrupted.

“It was he who had grown weary of me and succumbed to the charms of Miss Morstan.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Are you telling me that you deceived me and faked your own death just because I married Mary?”

“Not precisely.” He cleared his throat and took a sip of water. “It was after you left me that I began to consider how I might cast off my old life and begin another. Yet ironically it was also your marriage which made it impossible for me to take you into my confidence.”

“How so?” I demanded angrily. “My marriage changed nothing between us. I was still ever at your beck and call, ready to abandon both home and practice at a moment’s notice to follow you on some case or another. For God’s sake, Holmes, when you asked me to accompany you to the continent I did so without hesitation. I was away for weeks with hardly an opportunity to scrabble a note to Mary and did I ever once complaint of it?”

“No, you did not,” he said, “but weeks are one thing and forever is quite another, if I had asked you to journey on with me –“

“I would have done so! Tibet, China, Australia, I would have gone anywhere with you simply because you asked it of me.” I was too agitated to sit still. So I sprang to my feet, paced the few feet to the hearth and like a caged lion I turned back to face my tormenter. “And well you knew it, just as you knew that I loved you.”

Holmes took a long, deep breath that betrayed his pain more eloquently than any words. “You, however, did not know it,” he said.

That rankled because I knew that it was true. “Perhaps you should have told me, after all you had ample opportunity and you can be most convincing when you want to be.”

I waited for the sharp retort, but it did not come. Instead he half rose from his chair and I think that he would have gone from the room without another word had not that dratted cough taken him again. Holmes sank back into the chair and fumbled for a handkerchief to hold to his mouth.

My hand touched his bowed back and rested for a few moments between his shoulder blades even as I told myself that he did not deserve my concern.  Then I went to pour rich amber brandy for us both. By the time the coughing fit passed and he was able to take the glass from me my anger was quite spent.

I resumed my seat. “There are none so blind as those who will not see,” I quoted softly after a few quiet moments. “I don’t believe that I wanted to know, not about myself nor about you, knowing would have been difficult, complicated, like falling off the edge of an abyss.”

We exchanged rueful smiles.

“What would you have truly done if I had laid the truth out before you?” Holmes asked me. “If I had asked you to abandon everything and to let the world and your wife believe that you had also perished in those raging waters?”

We could have walked away together, he and I, unchained in death from all responsibly.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, but I did. “Dear God…I would have refused. It would have ripped my heart asunder, but I would have returned to London and to Mary.” The truth was cruel, but I could not lie to him or to myself. “At least I would have known that you lived.”

“You would have been content knowing?”

Holmes grey eyes were too bright. He must be getting feverish again. I ought to fetch him some medicine. How easy it was to slip into self-deception and to ignore the sharp sting behind my own eyes.

“No, I would never have been entirely content, not even if Mary had lived. If that was the future that you envisaged for me, Holmes, one of domestic bliss with Mary at my side and children at my knee, it would not have erased the ache in my heart.”

“It seemed a better future for you than one as a fugitive.” His gaze held mine. “An invert, a pariah in many lands, some with laws far crueller than those of England, roaming aimlessly through the world.”

 The sorrow in his voice was not lost on me. “It was not as you thought then, this freedom to cast off your old self and to travel the world in another guise?”

“I missed London. I missed you.” His lips quirked into a parody of a smile. “I even missed Sherlock Holmes.”

“I missed him too.”

Holmes took my hand when I held it out to him and entwined his fingers with mine. When the shadows crept into the room I lit the lamps as I did every evening. Then I rang for the maid and told her to bring our supper up on trays. We ate by the sitting room fire, reading each other items from the late editions of the London newspapers and talking idly of this and that. It was a very ordinary end to an extraordinary day. Just after the long case clock stuck eleven Holmes declared himself to be quite done in and went wearily up to his bed. I stayed by the fire until the midnight hour when the house was still and silent, then I went to join him, just as I did every night after that one.


End file.
